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The Supremacy of Culture in Successful Nations

It's been a mainstay of these columns that culture is a dominant--perhaps the predominant--force in determining economic success and civic stability.  The economist, Robert Samuelson, writing in Newsweek, uses Gregory Clark's newly released book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, to argue that very point. 

Although we may take issue with Clark's founding premise that the Industrial Revolution was the single modern event or element that led to Great Britain's economic--read cultural--ascendancy, the argument has an intuitive cogency that's difficult to refute.

Taking the argument into the substrata, we can hear our post-modernists' cries charging Clark with the left's version of a capital offense--cultural imperialism.  Indeed, culture today is a touchy subject because it implies a hierarchical relationship among nations and societies, which requires that we render a collective judgment upon each, something our modern sensibilities--which are, yes, culturally driven--proscribe.

But the facts do speak for themselves, and speaking of which, we would also list Andrew Roberts' superbly researched and eloquently written book, A History of The English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, as further evidence of the potency of culture as a force for economic success, and by extrapolation, civic advancement.  The question of whether culture is the precursor that drives economics, which, in turn, provides a fecund context for civic advancements (civil liberties, the rule of law, and such), is beyond the scope of our argument.  As with analogous arguments, such as "Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life," the clean dichotomies that we stipulate in argumentation are belied by the inherent complexities of the subjects, and so it's probable that a indeterminate mixture of all variables is complicit.

But, we are drawn to the notion that culture--which happens to be under direct assault for the nascent revelation that it does, in fact, matter--plays such a paramount role in virtually every vital realm of human affairs.  Those who have never considered it will be reflexively dismissive of it, but those who see into the crevices of our culture the roots of, on the one hand, major advancements, and, on the other, the resilient fetter, clearly appreciate its power over us.

By 'culture,' of course, we ultimately mean values and their unique expression in society.  Therefore, a culture that values--read, protects--life, from conception to natural death reflects a tacit endorsement of the sanctity of earthly existence, and one that doesn't, an equally stark denial of it. 

Or, to take the contentious issue of teenage sex education, if abstinence education helps even a minority of teens avoid sexual intercourse, why would anyone object to it?  Well, if you believe that sexual activity is purely recreational, that it's not, by edict from God, a sanctified activity reserved for marriage, then prohibiting teens from engaging in it makes absolutely no sense.

The list is endless and it cuts across every aspect of our lives.  But, in the end, we're left with Clark's and Robert's inescapable conclusion--one that is polemically case-hardened by history--that culture, which either supports or suppresses hard work, thrift, lawfulness, innovation, and perseverance, is at the core of both successful civilizations such as America, as well as those that have failed to extricate themselves from the bonds of poverty, tyranny, and civic unrest.

The Virtues of Gridlock

Today's editorial in the New York Times by David Brooks, the astute center-right columnist, makes the argument that Americans are largely a contented lot, but that they are unhappy with their public institutions.  They really only want the government to address a few macro issues such as

...terrorism, rising health care costs, looming public debt, illegal immigration, global warming and the rise of China and India.

Mr. Brooks argues that these are neither Democratic nor Republican concerns but that Americans feel the government is simply not up to the task.  Let's take a more fundamental approach to this issue.  As we've recently argued, Americans have absolutely no reason to be other than economically pleased with their lives because, on balance, they live in larger homes, drive better cars, have more luxurious vacations, and have a vastly broader array of technologically sophisticated goods to purchase at very competitive prices.

But, if Brooks is correct that Americans want those issues addressed, it's by no means clear that there is an even nominal consensus concerning which approach they want the government to take.

So, here is a brief analysis of the core problem which was conspicuous by its absence in Mr. Brooks' editorial. 

Terrorism.  President Bush has, indeed, aggressively pursued the 'war on terrorism,' and regardless of its inapt title, he's arguably made meaningful progress, despite the Democrats' studied stonewalling.  Indeed, they've obstructed his policies at virtually every turn, vilifying them with exaggerated claims that they abridge of our civil liberties.  They've also excoriated Mr. Bush for his prosecution of the war in Iraq despite the fact that real progress is being made in a cultural and civic milieu unprecedented in our history of military engagements.

Health care.  Costs are, in fact, rising, but that's because the burden is finally being shifted to consumers, where it rightfully belongs.  Unlike any other good or service, health care has enjoyed a sacred status and as such we've become culturally habituated to having it provided at a fraction of its real cost.  We don't expect that for our mortgages, legal or accounting services, or trips to Wal-Mart, why, pray tell, should we for our trips to the physician's office?  Yet, the Democrats are intent upon a system of 'universal care,' which, it if bears any semblance of the Canadian system, would be more correctly labeled, 'universal misery.' 

Public debt.  The simple answer is to put the brakes on spending, but as the case of earmarks has demonstrated, you can count on one hand the number of real fiscal conservatives in Congress.  Both parties are culpable, but it's more regrettable when Republicans, ostensibly the party of fiscal restraint, are elbowing their way to the trough.

Illegal immigration.  Another very simple solution:  Begin by enforcing our existing laws.  Then draw a bright line between legal immigration--which virtually all Americans support--and illegal immigration--which most Americans categorically do not support.  But these issues ebb and flow and once they're out of political sight our politicians collectively sigh for until the next Congressional session begins.

Global warming.  Every American and every politician should read Unstoppable Global Warming:  Every 1500 Years, by Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer.  There may never have been a subject that has been more thoroughly abused by politicians and the media than this.  Simply stated, the science that allegedly implicates humans in the slight increase in global temperatures is, at the very least, unsettled, and arguably, without merit. 

We'll leave the problem of the rise of India and China for another day, but the brief analysis above demonstrates the nexus where politics and policy collide and explains why it is that so very little is actually accomplished. 

That, in our view, is the predictable outcome of our system of government, in which are embedded a powerful array of checks and balances to inhibit the production of fashionable legislation predicated on hyped information, distorted facts, or inflamed passions.

So, if Mr. Brooks' charge that Americans want action on these issues is true, precisely what they want done is almost exclusively a matter of political opinion, and, as always, therein lies the rub as well as the virtues of gridlock.

The Left's Habit of Misappraising Our Enemy

A seminal hallmark of the 1930s was the intellectual incestuousness that infected the left, both here in America and abroad.  Their embrace of communism and appeasement of Hitler remain the Democratic Party's twin blights, and today a new generation has emerged that is arguably more inbred in its denial of the threat of radical Islam and the rogue Iranian regime.

Paul Krugman provides compelling evidence of this in his op-ed in today's New York Times by saluting every leftist platitude concerning the neoconservatives, some of whom want us to bomb Iran and who have allegedly exaggerated the Islamic threat for purely political reasons.

We begin with the left's common proclivity to deconstruct radical Islam, Osama bin Laden, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan into discrete arguments and charge that Republicans generally and neoconservatives specifically conflate and confuse them and their respective goals.  Implicit in their argument is the perplexing notion that our military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which provided an unprecedented, if fledgling form of democratic rule for over 50 million people, is somehow rendered impotent because Iraq wasn't involved in 9/11 and we haven't captured bin Laden.

From there the Krugmans of the world sardonically sniff that neocon assertions that Iran seeks world domination are "beyond ludicrous," because it doesn't have the financial clout, forgetting that 9/11 is estimated to have cost well under half a million dollars.  Moreover, because Ahmadinejad's plans aren't nationalistic in the tradition of World War II Krugman seems to dismiss his goal of a world without Israel and America. 

It's also further evidence that Krugman's expertise isn't in military planning when he writes that bombing Iran is our only option since "we've run out of troops" because a ground invasion has never been contemplated due to logistical complexities.  And, comparing Israel's air campaign against Hezbollah last year to a U.S. air attack on Iran is as effete as it is ignorant.

No one is arguing, as Krugman suggests, that al-Qaeda has any chance of "collapsing the United States," but there is a clear difference between collapsing it and crippling it.  9/11 demonstrated the potency of an asymmetrical attack using a kind of strategic version of chaos theory to find systemic vulnerabilities that could be easily exploited with devastating effect. 

Now elevate that to the level of a tactical nuclear device detonated in Chicago and you have a crippling, if not collapsing impact.  Is that distinction one Krugman and his liberal ilk are willing to accept for the purely cynical motivation of political advantage?

Iran & the Threat of Global Disaster

Talk by the Bush Administration of a threat of World War III if Iran is allowed entry into the club of nuclear powers has caused a cascade of editorializing.  From the world of 'soft power' we have the learned if somewhat anachronistic David Ignatius, writing in the Washington Post, who insists that aggressive sanctions is the prudent approach and that threatening Iran is only playing into the hard-liners' hands.

As evidence of its efficacy, he adduces Russian president Vladimir Putin's recent exchange with Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wherein Putin affirmed his support of the Security Council's demand that Iran cease uranium enrichment.  Putin also apparently outlined a proposal for "serious negotiations for a long-term settlement," and Khamenei, in response, said he "promised to look at this thoroughly." 

Those with historical memories more robust than that of a Mayfly will recall the infamous quote in the London Times, which editorialized that "we can do business with Herr Hitler," and British PM Chamberlain's ingeniously naive assertion that he had achieved "peace in our time" at the Munich Conference in 1939.  Of course, six months later, Hitler took all of Czechoslovakia.

Indeed, the premise Middle East negotiations is lying and deceit, which in their civic parlance is not only permitted it's hard-wired into the system of diplomacy.  That Putin's exchange was nothing more than grandstanding calculated to temper the Bush Administration's saber rattling is apparently lost on the likes of Ignatius, who, in classic State Department form, searches desperately for any semblance of conciliatory behavior with our arch enemies, which he misrepresents as summary evidence of unalloyed good will.

For a dose of reality we turn to Caroline Glick, writing in RealClearPolitics.com.  She analyzes Israel's recent strike on Syria's incipient nuclear site, which was built in collaboration with North Korea, and astutely notes that the lack of retaliatory measures by Syria or Iran may support the argument that a U.S. attack on Iran would also fail to elicit a military response.

However, she also references a far more serious revelation, which was recently reported in the Wall Street Journal.  That is, the underground collaboration by Syria, Iran, and North Korea in the development of nuclear weapons .  She correctly extrapolates that a U.S. attack on Iran may not seriously set its nuclear program back because the program is effectively spread throughout two other rogue regimes as well.

The broad conclusion we should draw from this policy juxtaposition is that timely military action against Iran for the left is categorically worse than learning to live with an Ahmadinejad with a nuke.  It's a hearty paradox that defies the logic of military history, not to mention any sane analysis of human motivation.

Deep within the modern liberal psyche lurks a resilient myth that feeds on the unfounded notion that evil is more a matter of perspective than substance, that no regime is immune from good faith negotiations, and that peace is the normal state of affairs in the universe of men.

Some myths are benign, so they can be embraced without fear of adverse consequences.  Others only appear benign, in large measure because of our culturally induced misreading of our adversary's intents, and the collateral propensity to minimize its lethality.  In the case of Iran, either of the two would be deleterious, but together they could easily spell global disaster.

Politics & the Calculus of Trust

Leadership at the presidential level is an amalgam of traits, including strength, moral clarity, adherence to principles, and, crucially, the capacity to engender trust.  As Daniel Henninger writes in the Wall Street Journal, our age seems predisposed to deconstruct leadership and meticulously weigh its parts, often providing disproportionate value to just one characteristic.

Mr. Henninger's focus is on Rudy Guiliani, and whether he can find a sufficiently sized patch of common ground and trust with the religious right, which, at this point, is by no means clear.  But the question is one we ought to seriously consider because electability, not purity of values, is the ultimate arbiter of power in American politics.

That's something Rep. Rahm Emanuel perfectly understood as he drafted the political blue print for the Democrats' winning campaign in 2006.  They targeted districts where the red-blue ratio was so blurred it caused political headaches, and they ran candidates who were ostensibly conservative, at least when compared with their liberal standard-bearers.  That many who won have since returned to their liberal comfort zones is yet further testimony to the malleability of political promises, but it doesn't diminish their achievement.

Indeed, they now control Congress, although their post-election track record is decidedly underwhelming.  That is due more to skewed strategic judgment and a misreading of political realities, but unlike many Republicans, they do understand that governing begins with winning elections, and that is predicated on achieving a political coalescence from the fractured issue-driven electorate.  No mean feat.

That takes us back to the definition of leadership and its relationship to the ability to govern.  In a certain sense any of the Republican candidates would be satisfactory in terms of their in-office performance; but getting there is quite another matter.  The Guiliani speech Mr. Henninger references is an apt example of leadership at its best--it exudes candor and a guileless expression of values and principles.

The advantage of that approach, in particular with high-stakes audiences such as those at the aptly named "Values Voters Summit," is that you avoid pandering, hedging, and telegraphing nuance, which voters can smell across the Potomac.  Guiliani excels in this regard, but so does Fred Thompson, and, in his own way, John McCain.  The only one who seems to have a candor deficit is Mitt Romney. 

That may not be entirely fair, but we all have a kind of autonomic, reflexive sense about presidential candidates that measures them along a scale we don't entirely understand ourselves.  But it's one we heavily rely on because at the bottom of the political ledger is line called 'trust,' and it's that we ultimately look to when we find ourselves in the voting booth.

Parsing the 'Secular-Progressive' Label

In response to our October 19th post, The Liberals' War With America, Tracey O'Donnell, who blogs at Swimming Upstream, posted the following comment:

"Progressing" towards Gomorrah

While it's a delight to read your posts - and thank you for your comment on mine - I must draw issue with the use of the term "secular progressive". I understand that this is the term in current use to refer to today's particular godless liberal agenda. It is also clear that you understand the how "SPs" define the word progress: ("progress, for the modern liberal is tantamount to degrading everything conservative.")Or just degrading everything, period.

So how did we get sucked in - again - to using a word with positive connotations (progressive is that which moves generally forward) to denote something negative - at odds with the word that describes it? So much of the "progressive" agenda is backwards-looking, especially if you expand the perspective past the last century. Perhaps you'll read my blog on the topic of the war of words (Home Field Advantage). I'd be interested in your feedback.

Her post, Home Field Advantage, uses the apt example of abortion rights to argue that Republicans have needlessly ceded polemical real estate to the left.  We gladly join her class action argument as we have historically argued that the left's use of the phrase "pro-choice" provides a wholly undeserved level of moral authority.  In particular, that we ought to force liberals to finish the sentence "We want to preserve a woman's right to choose," because it would spotlight the unsavory choice in question--ending the life of an innocent, unborn human being.

We segue to the term 'secular progressive' to weave the foregoing into a broader, and therefore, more persuasive argument.  Although from the conservative's perspective, the 'progressive' agenda has a decidedly backwards vision, we must understand the enemy before we can defeat it. 

In the liberal's refined universe the ultimate goal of earthly existence is to eliminate its perceived inequities, foibles, and suffering, all of which they deem both unacceptable and of no utility.  In that regard, the socialist's multi-tiered, cradle-to-grave guarantees, from health care to income to housing, are the mechanisms by which they hope to achieve their dream of heaven on earth.  To complete this grim vision, we must wed the term 'secular' to 'progressive' because of the left's inherent antipathy if not outright hostility to religion.

Therefore, in the view of liberals, the 'progressive' component is a calculus that defines the degree to which they've achieved their goals of income redistribution, Draconian regulation, and uniformly guaranteed outcomes for disparate efforts.  That conservatives find their policies hostile to individual freedoms and innately counter-intuitive to achieving optimal human happiness is entirely lost on them.  In turn, conservatives are convinced the modern liberal is a walking anachronism because he has failed to extricate himself from the intellectual and economic bondage of socialism.

It's a cultural curiosity that we will continue to analyze but it will require the passage of time and the inevitable condemnation of future generations which will render a savage judgment on modern liberalism for, among other moral failures, its despicable demand for the right to murder the innocent unborn, now totaling some 50 million and counting since that jurisprudential travesty known as Roe v. Wade.

The Left's War Against the Military

In our age when military action has been stigmatized as barbaric and lacking the elite's sense of nuance, military heroes have also been depreciated.  Evidence abounds of military personnel who died saving others in Iraq and Afghanistan that has been buried in our major newspapers if, indeed, they covered it at all.  Lt. Michael P. Murphy, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Bush yesterday, is a rare exception, one the media simply could not ignore.

The article in the New York Times provided the justification for the award, including his history of achievements and the sort of flinty resilience the Navy SEALs are known for.  And if you saw the televised report of his parents accepting the award from President Bush, you better understand that heroism is an enduring and timeless characteristic of our military--what's changed is the media's indifference in reporting it.

That stems from the fact that the media is packed with left-of-center reporters who tend to view the military as a proxy for imperialism and the nationalist instincts that liberals so thoroughly disdain.  Their desire for world peace, which is typically an emotional and amorphous compendium of cliches underwritten by a heartfelt if wholly naive appeal to diplomatic solutions, is best kept isolated in fantasies because it shares far more in common with that genre than the real world.

A cultural corollary of this is the fact that sacrificing one's life for a greater cause, which was historically raised to the level of moral greatness, is now met with looks of studied shock.  That itself is the result of the left's efforts to eliminate evil from our collective lexicon, and once that was achieved we naturally can't imagine anything worth dying for.

Therefore, as we watch Iran aggressively working to acquire a nuclear weapon, it's instructive to listen to the Democratic leadership which insists that it's a threat we can contain.  That view is predicated on the fallacious notion that Iranian president Ahmadinejad is interested in negotiations when, in fact, his goal of regional hegemony and a world without the United States.

The modern liberal sensibility, which has successfully replaced hard reasoning with an infantile appeal to our emotions, struggles with heroism because it fails to recognize that unalloyed evil exists as surely today as it did in 1936. 

Those fighting this war against the Islamic extremists, who correctly understand what is at stake, are today's heroes.  Although most on the left believe their efforts to prevail are misguided, not unlike the warriors who defended American values during World War Two, today's heroes will continue to defend the liberals' right to be wrong.

Is Conservatism on the Ropes?

As we've argued, there are two explanations for the 2006 Republican Congressional losses, and they may be politically commingled.  The first is that corruption and mismanagement drove Reagan Democrats and Independents into the Democrats' arms; the second is that the electorate is slowly moving leftwards.  An editorial by Michael Tomasky in the UK Guardian raises this very question.

Although conservatism has a long history, as Mr. Tomasky correctly observes, in modern American politics, its a pedigree of recent origin.  Despite a shaky inception in the mid-50s, it found its footing with Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and a host of other bright and talented thinkers and politicians.  Besides learning about the virtues of lower taxes and a smaller government footprint, Americans seemed refreshed by the nearly limitless sense of individual freedom and collateral reliance on personal responsibility that are at the core of conservatism.

Beyond that, and in contrast to liberalism, conservatism requires more work, both intellectually and physically, not to mention more resilience and discipline.  It's against that backdrop that the argument can be made that Americans may have reached the failsafe point of cultural exhaustion.  The presumed rigors of modern life, the vast majority of which are self-imposed (or, more accurately, self-inflicted), have apparently led to our collective capitulation, and, white flag in hand, we're calling in air strikes in the form of more government in our lives.

It's curious because at no time in recorded history has life been as free of physical labor, want, penury, or disease.  Indeed, we live longer and more disease-free than ever before, and we do so in houses that would simply stun our forebears.  Further, travel is easy and inexpensive, and we need only climb into one of our two cars to drive to the supermarket, Wal-Mart, or massive home improvement emporium to find every conceivable item in the known universe.

And, perhaps, therein lies part of the problem.  As Jeff Goldbloom dryly observes in the film Jurassic Park, in response to Richard Attenborough's development of the process for genetically recreating pre-historic life, "You didn't do anything to earn it."  Indeed, we're merely the grasping and entitled beneficiaries of those who labored before us, and every problem, regardless of its magnitude, is met with the same sense of acute irritation and annoyance.

It's in that context that modern liberalism, which stipulates the need for a Leviathan-like governmental presence in our lives, that is, a more aggressive approach to redistributing income while ceding to it control for such apparent entitlements as health care, appears to be taking root.

But when your goal is the reduction or elimination of life's daunting challenges, whether it's saving for your children's college education or funding your own operational expenses by learning to live within your means, you're also forfeiting the special rewards that naturally accrue as you learn to fend for yourself.  Safety nets at once blunt motivation and create a European-like indolence.

That, in brief, is the case for modern liberalism, and it's one that may be gaining currency in America.  Of course, the media has been ingeniously complicit in portraying conservativism as the polity of the rich and insensitive--which, in the liberals' eyes, are the twin evils of modern life. 

In this regard, the 2006 elections were either an anomaly or the beginning of a political trend.

The Liberals' War with America

For a glimpse into the world of a cutting-edge secular progressive we link to Richard Belzer writing at Huffingtonpost.com.  Although it's a brief piece it's a veritable compendium of fringe charges such as President Bush's alleged desire to "usher in World War III, along with a smattering of veritable sardonic observations such as questioning the fantastic notion that radical Islam is real, ending with the leaden tocsin that

The Democratic candidates are scarily making no promises to end the Iraq occupation.

Some might find the liberals steady descent into political oblivion comic theater but it's actually a sign of an unhealthy Republic when one of the major parties is apparently comfortably ensconced on the edge of the known political world.  Denial, to paraphrase Lady Thatcher, is not an adequate defense.

Yet the left has historically demonstrated a remarkable willingness to deny everything from tyrants such as Stalin to the fact that toppling Saddam Hussein was a positive development on balance, because whenever they make even cursory concessions they promptly drown them in a sea of caveats.  Progress, for the modern liberal, is tantamount to degrading everything conservative, which is why our recent successes in Iraq are such depressing news for them.

Another article of liberal faith is that painful consequences that result from imprudent or outright stupid decisions aren't our own fault.  So it is that it's the banks and lending institutions that are at fault for the defaults by Americans who didn't read the fine print. 

Indeed, gone is the simple notion of personal responsibility and the attendant corollary of learning from adverse consequences.  Coupled with the inbred instinct to embrace entitlements which blunt motivation and breed civic arrogance and you have a recipe for a cultural meltdown.  Call it the infantalization of America, but every step we take along that path emboldens the left because their dream of power and control is what makes them take their next breath.

The problem is that our ability to defend ourselves is profoundly inhibited when nearly half the nation denies we're at war with the radical Islamists and work tirelessly to undermine our efforts to gain an advantage through such programs as the NSA's electronic surveillance initiative. 

What we need is a winning solution to our problems, one that doesn't apologize for our core values and principles, and one that isn't timid about projecting them when appropriate.  Given the transnational impulse of most of the Democrats and their propensity to criticize America before they target our enemies, it's clear they aren't up to the task.

The First Truly Lost Generation

People attentive to the migration of authority from parents to schools in the past forty years may not be surprised to learn that the Portland Maine School Committee voted last evening to allow Middle School children access to the full range of contraception services--yes, condoms, depo shots, the whole shebang.

As reported in today's Portland Press Herald, the vote stunned some and comforted others depending upon whether they saw it as an astonishingly obtuse decision or an enlightened evolution in child-rearing.  The debate will ensue, but it is truly lamentable that we've reached the point in our moral devolution where eleven year olds--who can't legally drink, smoke, or drive--will have ready access to condoms.

This decision has achieved what most of us would have found impossible, which is a rare combination of a collective abdication of moral responsibility and a cynical endorsement of the presupposition that children are immune from ethical imprinting.  We don't need psychologists to tell us that eleven year old children are emotionally unformed and fragile souls whose moral immaturity and compromised judgment can conspire to cause them indelible pain and suffering.  Yet this decision puts them in the wholly untenable position of encouraging an act for which many adults are emotionally unfit.

We must wonder why the liberals, who are champions of this kind of stupidity, suppose that those 'victimized' by the sub-prime housing debacle aren't truly capable of making an informed decision, but insist that children have the maturity to decide whether or not it's wise to engage in sexual intercourse.

As we've observed, in the course of one generation the lessons of two millennia have been overturned, sacred traditions sullied, moral imperatives stigmatized, and the principles of child-rearing fundamentally rewritten.  The result is sexualized and poorly educated children who are prematurely burdened with the challenges of adulthood. 

The legacy of the baby boomer generation, which has been largely, if not exclusively underwritten by liberalism, will include a twofold moral blight:  First, and most prominently, the fifty million silenced souls who were slaughtered before taking their first breath will remain a permanent indictment on the left's collective lack of conscience; and, second, the secular-progressive agenda, which features the kind of moral depravity inherent in the Portland School Committee's decision, is putting us on a course of cultural anarchy that will secure our reputation as the first truly lost generation.

The Left's War Against Common Sense

Political motivations often lead us down paths of twisted logic because satisfying those desires are on a visceral par with human sexuality--they are powerful instincts that are nearly immune to reason.  Thomas Sowell takes us on an intellectual tour of just such a motivation, the one liberals employ for justifying aberrant human behavior.

As Mr. Sowell argues, the notion of tagging the root causes of criminal behavior to 'injustice and inequalities' is routinely trotted out by the left despite the fact that the evidence points in a distinctly different direction.  His argument is cogent and only those with the kind of preordained goal noted above will take issue with him.

But, as is our wont, we'll concern ourselves with the meta-question of precisely why liberals find themselves in the thrall of such misinformed notions, and it's not merely for political purchase, which so often explains their behavior.  Indeed, it's a far more profound matter, one that illuminates their preference for the downtrodden in novels and films, not to mention paintings, sculpture, and photography, the kind that graphically and emotionally depicts the 'human condition,' which is code for a kind of rarefied fatalism, itself the product of a post-modern sensibility.

Our understanding of good and evil dramatically influences our view of the world and universe and, in particular, the role of human agency, from which naturally flows our definition of justice.  When coupled with the left's predilection to explicate aberrant human behavior with nuances so vast and numerous as to stagger the imagination, it's no wonder that the historical notion of freedom of choice is not in their moral lexicon.

So we find them in diligent search of explanations for everything from tax evaders to mass murderers, jay-walkers to despots, because the underlying rationale has special meaning for them.  Why?  Because it provides a universal justification for nearly every illicit behavior, from the petty misdemeanor to the most heinous felony. 

Simply stated, if we can provide evidence that events or genetic predisposition or historical oppression were preconditional variables we can parse the presumably inexplicable code of human behavior.  That, in turn, externalizes the source of responsibility by moving simple illegal behavior into the realm of psychiatry where creating a diagnosis for behavior that would historically lead to imprisonment is tantamount to a blanket justification.  Or, they turn to philosophy and throw up their hands arguing that aberrant behavior is just to complex to understand.

Beneath that predicate is their political goal of redistributing wealth--that is, providing substantive rewards for phantom achievements--for which they use an insulting calculus of worth based on race, ethnicity, and gender. 

Therefore, as we gaze upon the mastodon of our encroaching federal bureaucracy, which devours money as indiscriminately as a shark eats, we shouldn't be surprised that they instinctively look to the government to redress perceived wrongs.  That leads them to conveniently pass over the fact that timely justice for criminals in the form of severe penalties is the single most plausible explanation for the drop in crime in the past forty-five years.

Indeed, they prefer the emotionally satisfying, if wholly counter-intuitive notion that certain people are inherently incapable of success merely because of the color of their skin or their gender. 

It's yet another chapter in the left's war against common sense.

General Sanchez' Speech: The Myth of Media Objectivity

Judging by the reporting of Lt.Gen. Ricardo Sanchez' recent speech concerning the Iraq war, you would have thought his calumny was reserved exclusively for the Bush Administration.  But Jack Kelly, writing for RealClearPolitics.com provides the proverbial 'rest of the story.' 

Recall the New York Times' falsely encyclopedic masthead that reads "All The News That's Fit to Print," which echoes Walter Conkrite's ersatz sign-off phrase, "And that's the way it is."  With the genesis of Fox News and the Internet, the argument that news reporting is immune from political bias can no longer be made with a straight face.

To wit, the reporting on the Sanchez speech perfectly mirrors the mainstream media's instinctive impulse to select quotes and content that neatly comports with its message, in this instance, the alleged failure of the Bush Administration's prosecution of the Iraq war.  That truth is the first casualty in the process of selecting media content is of no apparent concern for reporters because their biased crafting of the news obviously trumps a fidelity to the facts.

Call it 'stove-pipe thinking' or 'group-think,' there is an undeniable herd mentality among the media giants and it's one that is both ideological inflexible and in complete denial.  A telling quote from the Sanchez speech by Kelly says it all:

Over the course of this war, tactically insignificant events have become strategic defeats for America because of the tremendous power and impact of the media.

The press rarely misses an opportunity lodge allegations of abuse of office, mismanagement of the war, and a variety of related charges, and they do so with absolute impunity.  Curiously, they have an inbred and inviolable rule that effectively prohibits an even cursory professional introspection in part because they habitually disavow any admission of reportorial bias, something most Americans find laughable.

Truth, it has been credibly demonstrated, can be massaged into a form unrecognizable from its original incarnation or omitted entirely, and the result is the kind of reporting we witnessed in the wake of General Sanchez' speech. 

At this point in time, the notion of an impartial media has devolved into a combination of myth and comedy.  We can only thank the advent of the Internet and its myriad sources of news and information that provides a desperately needed corrective to the rank bias that is piped into our living rooms and printed in newspapers.

Economics Through the Eyes of the Liberal

For Paul Krugman and his legion of liberals, 'economic inequality' is a blight on our capitalist system, one that dwarfs its obvious benefits.  Writing in Salon, Andrew Leonard argues that this is a great time to be a liberal.  Stay with us as we sample this deft but tortured line of reasoning.

Most Americans have witnessed the special scorn the left has for success, in particular for those who take risks, make sacrifices, and ultimately achieve a measure of economic prosperity.  Let's gaze through liberalism's uniquely biased prism where the rules of economics are suspended and the terms of civic engagement are rewritten to handicap for everything from race to gender.

We begin with the most obvious but consistently overlooked observation in the liberal polity:  That is, in order to accept its premise that economic inequality is inherently unfair you must deny that free markets in democratic societies world wide have been their sole cause for individual freedom and economic success, because you can't achieve the later without the former.

They would deny it, but the facts in the matter are impossible to refute.  Whether it's modern day Ireland and the former Soviet bloc nations which have instituted sweeping economic reforms on one side of the spectrum or Chavez' Venezuela and Castro's Cuba at the other, economic liberalization and freedom are inextricably intertwined because the former demands the rule of law in order to take its first breath, and where tyrants rule, people are little more than economic slaves.

In the lexicon of liberalism, any hint of inequality is a sign of systemic failure, regardless of the fact that the vast majority of people in the lowest economic quintile are consistently progressing upwards.  The deft approach referenced above might better be characterized as a cynically selective exploitation of economic snapshots that at once belie the reality of income advancements and provide political momentum for government intervention, typically in the form of higher taxes and regulation.

Recall that Senator Clinton said her first act as president would be to raise corporate income taxes, which betrays a staggering ignorance of economics since corporations don't pay income taxes--consumers do.  From that we must conclude her primary motivation is political not economic because for every percent you increase corporate taxes you inhibit consumers' ability to spend and save according to their own self-interest.

Indeed, whether it's the quintessential leftist example of economic abuse--the minimum wage--or their stunning denial that lower marginal tax rates lead to increased tax revenues, their market interventions achieve a modicum of credibility only when incentives and disincentives are tortured into compliance with a wholly unnatural set of human characteristics.

However, for the left that is considered high art and a virtue worth pursing because it purchases them power by preying on the electorate's most primitive fear--the fear of economic failure.  In that regard, it's a base and shameful approach to economics and the market place, but the conservative alternative--setting the ground rules and allowing people to rise to their highest potential on their own--is simply not acceptable because some people will fail outright and others may only achieve modest results--and, most damning, liberals would lose their stiffling control of the people--and that the liberal mind can not countenance.

Al Gore: Master of the Liberal Universe

For a man born to wealth, raised in private schools, and who worked his way up the political food chain to the vice presidency of the United States, Albert Gore has single-handedly elevated narcissism to a virtue.  For a glimpse of how his jointly awarded Nobel Peace Prize is playing in Great Britain we look to the UK Telegraph, where Damian Thompson documents Mr. Gore's many paradoxes, character quirks, and propensities for exaggeration.

Self-aggrandizement is an unflattering trait, in large part because it shines a stark light on the least complimentary aspects of human nature, which, among many others, are the precise opposite of humility.  But beyond that, we're obliged to ask how a man who distorts the facts about climate change, who infers a positive correlation between speaking loudly and credibility, and who is a paragon of hypocrisy for his brazen squandering of fossil fuels as he lectures the common man about conservation, is selected for a peace prize?

Peace, as most historians will attest, is won by decimating belligerents and aggressors and forcing them to sign meaningful treaties that have razor-sharp teeth should they fail to comply.  Our recent habit of lionizing champions of peace who merely speak and write eloquently of the virtues of the Golden Rule, belies the notion that not one of those people has ever stopped a despot.

Therefore, no one should be surprised that the Nobel committee, itself a bastion of peace-loving Swedes with nary a back-bone among them, would find Mr. Gore the perfect candidate for this award.  It requires no heavy lifting in terms of degrading a heinous foe or eliminating a tyrant.  Rather, in our age of rank emotionalism, it makes soft demands that feel good but aren't burdened with the weight of evidence.

Were the committee truly devoted to peace it would award the prize to President Bush who did, in fact, topple a dictator in Saddam Hussein, and who brought a fledgling and struggling vision of peace and freedom to the fifty million souls who live in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

But a culture that punishes principle and rewards cowardice is hardly wont to politically canonize a man who refused to capitulate to the liberal establishment, which has no stomach for seeing through on a commitment that a majority of Senate Democrats signed on to. 

So, we're made to suffer the slings and arrows of Mr. Gore who has achieved the kind of sainthood that liberals crave--the recognition by a transnational, politically correct body of elites who, as William Butler Yeats wrote in a different context, create 'monuments to their own magnificence.'

Obama's Hour Upon the Stage

Rumors of Senator Obama's political death may be greatly exaggerated but it may be more a matter of timing than truth.  We begin with Steven Stark's piece in the Boston Phoenix, which brings Obama's considerable flaws into relief. 

The primary characteristic in great presidents is leadership, which is more than an amalgam of strength, courage, and vision.  More crucially, it's the ability to convince the public that your particular blend of those traits are compelling reasons to win their vote.  When we think about a Jack Kennedy or a Ronald Reagan we are instantly drawn into their unique vision, their sense of heartfelt conviction, and the special love they have for this great Republic.

When juxtaposed with Barack Obama, who rarely misses an opportunity to tell us how marvelous he is, rather than showing us, the Illinois senator with a remarkably thin resume betrays a callow political bearing.  Yet, as Stark reminds us, Obama is actually older than many seminal leaders who made their way onto our national stage.  But we know in our gut that he seems so much younger than a Martin Luther King or either Jack or Robert Kennedy as they emerged onto the national scene.

Those titans acted with a convincing sense of conviction, whereas Obama's oration seems highly derivative and somewhat staged.  It's as though he hasn't developed his own political voice so he continuously plucks bits and parts from the lives of the truly famous, which even the inattentive among us must admit fails to resonate.

A close cousin of leadership is authenticity, which is another opportunity for presidential candidates to distinguish themselves.  However, in that regard as well Obama's speeches have a forced sense of seriousness about them, which reveals a desperate desire to be taken more seriously than his words would merit. 

Most Americans yearn for messages that are simple in nature but compellingly articulated and fleshed out with colorful and nuanced examples.  They are at once comforting and convincing because they afford us the opportunity to actively participate in the candidate's vision.

Although we're still in the first act of this political play, Obama's hour upon the stage hasn't been convincing thus far.  Many are drawn to him because he's the proverbial 'fresh face,' or because they are terrified of Senator Clinton with her steamer trunks of baggage that precede her. 

Those aren't sufficient reasons to propel someone into the White House, but unless he steps out of character soon that is the only impression voters will have.

Scoring the Republican Debate

The Thompson debate debut was met with mixed results.  Byron York writes in National Review Online that his performance was "just fine."  Romney himself said he "passed the test," and opined that "I thought he proved he was a first-tier candidate."  Those comments may reassure the jitters felt by many since Thompson announced his candidacy, but there is clearly cause for concern.

For contrast, we look to Noam Scheiber of The New Republic, who seemed to accurately key in on Thompson's awkwardness and apparent inability to field questions in the crisp and targeted ways these venues demand.  There is an innate sense confidence and easy command of the material that top-tier candidates have, one that both convinces you he's in complete control of his message and that he's as much at ease in front of millions as he would be in your living room.  Those characteristics seemed lacking in Thompson last evening and his performance to date has been neither dazzling nor inspiring.

Beyond those observations, it was Guiliani who appeared intellectually focused and galvanized, ready to spar with any and all takers.  He has the prosecutor's instant command of the facts and ability to weave them into a coherent argument that is infused with quick wit and an intuitive sense of the opponent's vulnerabilities. 

Romney was also equal to the rigors of the questioning and stood his ground against  Guiliani as they sparred over taxes and spending.  Despite his strong performance, there is an unpleasant kind of mechanical undertone to his responses, as though a scriptwriter were filling in the blanks to questions.  Indeed, connecting with viewers, lightly embellishing deliveries with verve and conviction, both of which are crucial in debate forums, seemed somewhat lacking.

Curiously, Ann Coulter, who was interviewed this morning on Dennis Prager's radio show, said she favored Romney over Guiliani at this moment.  Her argument wasn't convincing, essentially because she overlooked the electoral map's shift in recent elections.  To wit, the candidate who can carry Florida and Ohio will probably win the election.

Beyond being a contender in those states, Guiliani has a sporting chance in the mid-West, in particular, in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, and Michigan.  If it's Hillary on the horse next door, her heavy negatives will come strongly into play in those states.

There will certainly be more debates as we head into the primary season, but one thing is obvious:  Republicans who are preoccupied with absolute fidelity to principles will find themselves out in the cold.  As Mr. Prager said yesterday in a different context, candidates must be measured against one another, not against an absolute, because, unfortunately, we live in a relative world.

Seymour Hersh & the Left's Disdain of Confrontation

For reasons best explained by a future historian, the modern Democratic sensibility is instinctively averse to confrontation.  It may be a cultural relic from Vietnam, politically nurtured by the first truly emasculated president, Bill Clinton, but doing violence against our enemies for most Democrats breaches an apparently sacrosanct, if wholly obtuse, trust.  We link to Thomas Joscelyn's piece in the Weekly Standard which uses the work of Seymour Hersh to illustrate an important part of this point.

Those who have waded into Hersh's arguments about the nefarious and clandestine inner-workings of the Bush administration can attest to his remarkable facility for connecting inherently disparate dots, creating dark motivations and sinister plots with a tissue of evidence.

However, our interest in this is the intellectual gears that drive his arguments and fire the furnace of his hyper-kinetic imagination, all of which is predicated on the apparent distrust of a robust American foreign policy.  The latest chapter of this policy malaise for Democrats is the prospect of America going to war with Iran. 

In the war between the realists and neoconservatives the former managed to get it wrong on virtually every account.  One of the most trenchant articles on the history of neoconservatism appeared in the October edition of Commentary Magazine. 

As the author, Joshua Muravchik observes:

Over the course of those decades [the last 30 years], the likes of Carl Levin and Edward Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi had opposed virtually every new U.S. weapons system and every stout anti-Communist policy—in other words, the very measures that led to victory in the cold war. They also opposed the 1991 Gulf war to force Saddam out of Kuwait, and military action against Serbia in Bosnia. Never once did they acknowledge error or revisit their own mistaken judgments, although in each case the neoconservative critique of those judgments was proved right. Are we now to suppose that, whatever may have gone wrong so far in Iraq, we can vanquish the forces of terrorism by restricting ourselves to the liberals’ favored instruments—diplomacy, foreign aid, and the UN?

This is a succinct compilation of the failed approach the modern Democratic Party has brought to the challenges we have and continue to face, in particular when we are obliged to confront evil.  It's also a textbook example of the folly of interminable diplomacy which the enemy only exploits to his advantage, making subsequent interventions needlessly more costly in terms of casualties and money.

Yet the Hershes of the world wring their collective hands at the prospect of the U.S. intervening before Iran becomes a bona fide producer of nuclear weapons. Returning to Mr. Joscelyn's piece we see in Hersh what might be dubbed the 'forest-and-trees phenomenon,' which amounts to becoming to thoroughly entangled in the chase of one's avowed political enemy that one looses sight of the real enemy:

He [Hersh] is so myopically focused on exposing malfeasance--both real and imagined--on the part of the executive branch that he ignores legitimate concerns about Iran's ongoing role in the terrorists' worldwide war.

All of this is emblematic of the left's preoccupation with the political score card, the balance of power in Washington, and the next election and, crucially, their studied misinterpretation of the nature of evil in our modern world.  Mistakes in all walks of life are unavoidable, but when they are repeated as is the case with the Democrats' abysmal track record on national security, they can be justifiably accused of raising strategic bungling to an art form.

Mr. Hersh seems to be the quintessential architect behind such a movement, and the tragedy is that he's dragging the Party down with him.

Rep. Paul in an Age of Nuclear Weapons

Although just a year ago few Americans would recognize the name of Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas has since made quite a splash with his unusual blend of non-interventionism and explanations for 9/11.  We link to his piece today in the Union Leader to provide readers with another bevy of anachronistic policy recommendations.

Mr. Paul defends his non-interventionist foreign policy by asserting that he would fully engage all nations in free trade--all nations, because, in his view, limiting participation based on a nation's alignment with American values is inconsistent with the Founding Fathers.  And, since he states that he believes that ideas do not have an "expiration date," we must assume he is as willing to trade with Kim Jong Il as he is with Nicolas Sarkozy.

We can debate the notion that our Founders' free trade instincts would remain unrevised in a world where rogue nations have nuclear weapons, but one can't help but conclude that Paul's policy deck is short a few cards.  Indeed, he believes that absolute free trade coupled with "diplomacy, engagement, and setting a positive example" are all that's necessary to safeguard U.S. interests.  If, as many physicists tell us, there are alternate universes, Mr. Paul must surely inhabit one of them.

He pushes the argument further by arguing that exporting democracy at the barrel of a gun is a "counterproductive approach that actually leads the United States to be resented and more isolated in the world."  He must have forgotten last century's two world wars where America exported democratic values by stamping out communism, fascism, and totalitarian impulses world wide.  We can hear him lecture us--how dare we tell the likes of Hitler that murdering Jews is wrong, that civil rights matter, not to mention the rule of law?

A bumper sticker has been spotted around town and it reads "Not all the world's problems have an American solution."  This is code for the Paulist approach to foreign policy.  America, which is synonymous with democracy--or in our unique case, a constitutional Republic--has its roots in Periclean Greece and since the 5th century B.C., a wide variety of governmental structures have been tried and history is littered with their remains.

Now we find ourselves in a world of asymmetrical warfare, where the likes of radical Islam feeds on unstable regimes and devours them from within.  Whether it's Afghanistan on one end of the spectrum or France on the other, there is an undeniable pestilence afoot and we ignore it at our peril.  The notion that "diplomacy and engagement" is a credible approach to dealing with Iran would be laughable were it not so patently dangerous.

We must presume that a President Paul would argue for permanent engagement with Iran, with no threat or recourse to military action, even as it acquired a nuclear weapon.  Then what would he do when Ahmadinejad pointed nuclear-tipped missiles at Israel?  Keep the State Department elites chatting away as the countdown commenced?

Although he is correct on taxes and spending, Paul and his supporters really shouldn't wonder why he is summarily dismissed when it comes to foreign policy.

Winning the Battle, but Losing the War

The goal of moral purity, which is a worthy pursuit, is routinely at odds with its close cousin, political viability.  Tom Bevan, of RealClearPolitics, outlines the contours of this conundrum for us, setting the stage for an inevitable confrontation among Republicans, which will pit social conservatives against the Realpolitik arm of the Party.

The former argues that abdication of principle is a mortal sin not worthy of the goal of political supremacy; the latter asserts that the only thing worse than a Republican president with inconstant social policy credentials is a Democrat who, besides being unpredictable on national security and enamored of high taxation, is guaranteed to fulfill her promises of social anarchy--i.e., a brazen defense of everything from partial-birth abortion to teenage abortions to gay marriage.

The backdrop to this, which is often overlooked, is the primary cause of Republican congressional losses in 2004.  Although the Iraq war and corrupt Republican leaders were serious and measurable deficits, there is also evidence of a tectonic shift in the electorate towards the mushy middle.  Indeed, the harsh edges of both parties have become toxic to many mainstream Americans, in large measure due to the left's insistence that the moral dimensions of life are not black and white. 

Coupled with our culturally inbred incapacity to render moral judgments and the depreciation of the historical value of personal responsibility, we're left with scant few checks on socially aberrant behavior and a nascent support for government-based solutions to every problem under the sun.

That doesn't bode well for a strict conservative, but it does auger well for a staunch fiscal conservative and a defense hawk who is agnostic on the socially contention issues of the day.  Especially one who does support a narrowly construed role for our judiciary and who has pledged to appoint only Constitutional constructionists, which are Kryptonite to liberalism's vision of the federal judiciary as an extension of the legislative branch.

So, it's really a matter of confronting the fluid nature of the American electorate whose political identity shifts with the ebb and flow of cultural influences.  Although Republicans should always support pro-life candidates with strong national security credentials, there is also a strategic obligation to maximize the chances for political victory.

Should America Withdraw from the World Stage?

That our chronic problems in Iraq have sullied the neo-con waters is by now unequivocal.  Indeed, the historically compelling notion of seeding democratic values in inhospitable places is now seen as a quaint and fading relic of the failed Bush Doctrine.  As a polemical counterweight we examine Daniel Henninger's trenchant piece in today's Wall Street Journal. 

Mr. Henninger eloquently and cogently makes the case that the goal of spreading democracy has been tossed under the bus because for many in America and Europe as well, it's just too difficult.  You see in this time of clear distinctions and summary conclusions, mixed results are simply unacceptable.  That such thinking blurs and obfuscates the nascent and manifestly noxious threat of radical Islam is of apparently no concern to those who argue for a more 'modest' American foreign policy.

That, of course, is code for the kind of restrained policy that telegraphs both a moral and strategic indifference to world events.  That was the message that Washington sent in the '90s when over 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered as America refused to awaken from its moral slumber.  Prior to that, the same message of national resignation resonated with Pol Pot after our precipitous departure from South-East Asia, and the result was the wholesale decimation of two-plus million Cambodians.

We can retrace this lesson by decades or, indeed, centuries, cataloging pogroms and genocides that began as the sparks of wayward despots and ended as conflagrations due to the civilized world's astounding incapacity to act.  But the question is whether we're sufficiently obtuse to repeat those historical lessons, whether our sense of collective resignation and inability to stomach casualties will consign us to a fate of walling ourselves off from the real world?

Although fantasy has a place in the lives of our imagination, those charged with dealing with the world's belligerents don't have the luxury to indulge such impulses.  Yet many on the left are nurturing the dangerous notion that raising the draw bridge will effectively immunize us from real or would-be aggressors.  Their convenient response is that the U.S. must be more discrete in how it projects power, that transposing our values onto other cultures and nations is at once an arrogant and ill-fated exercise. 

That line of reasoning is the faithful extrapolation of their wholly unsubstantiated argument for the moral equivalence of all nations and it historically found them in the embarrassing position of embracing the likes of Fidel Castro, and, most recently, Hugo Chavez.

None of this bodes well for those who correctly understand the threat of asymmetrical warfare, or the threat of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has pledged the destruction of Israel and is pursuing cruise missiles capable of striking the United States. 

America will always be able to retaliate against these threats, but waiting until they have gathered into a formidable foe seems the least prudent approach.  But because our will, along with our courage have joined the list of endangered virtues, that's precisely the direction we're heading.